Thursday, February 11, 2016

The Art of Using Birds in Movie Titles

For ages, movie producers have tried to find new and innovative ways to make their movie a blockbuster. One common trend that has been observed most frequently in the past decade has been the use of birds in the titles of movies.

Some of the most successful and highly-acclaimed movies of all time have used birds in their title: Black Swan (2010), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and Chicken Little (2004) to name a few.

There is speculation over when this trend started but most movie buffs agree that the first big movie that used a bird in its title was Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 thriller, The Birds. After The Birds's gigantic success, many movies followed in its path, but were forced to take circuitous methods of using bird names.

There are many ways you can go about using birds in your title. Some movie makers like to make movies about penguins and be very straightforward with their titles such as Penguins of Madagascar (2014) and March of the Penguins (2005) while others like to take trickier approaches such as Robin Hood (1973), Robin Hood (2010), and Black Hawk Down (2001).

Although these movies took the approach of adding a bird in the title while keeping birds out of the plot, nobody has done as good of a job at subliminally inserting a bird in a movie title than Michael Moore with his widely successful 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine which cleverly inserted the word "owl" into the title.

We might never know if the fact that birds are in the titles of these movies are what made them successful but we can at least say with some certainty that the use of birds didn't hurt the films.